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CSLI Calendar, Wednesday, 30 January 2008, vol. 23:19
CSLI CALENDAR OF PUBLIC EVENTS
______________________________________________________________________
30 JANUARY 2008 Stanford Vol. 23, No. 19
______________________________________________________________________
A weekly publication of the
Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
a subdivision of H-STAR, http://hstar.stanford.edu/
Stanford University, Cordura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4101
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/
____________
ACTIVITIES FROM 30 JANUARY 2008 TO 8 FEBRUARY 2008
WEDNESDAY, 30 JANUARY 2008
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [30-Jan-08]
Gates B01
"Organic Thin Film Flexible Electronics"
Zhenan Bao
Chemical Engineering, Stanford
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [30-Jan-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Jesse Fink
Co-Founder, MissionPoint Capital Partners, (Co-Founder,Priceline)
Steve Blank
Stanford Professor and Serial Entrepreneur
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [31-Jan-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"New Trends in the Foundations of Mathematics"
Grigori Mints
Stanford
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
12:15pm Stanford Networking Seminar [31-Jan-08]
Packard 101
"Observations on ISP Core Network CapEx Costs"
Drew Perkins
Infinera
http://netseminar.stanford.edu/
1:00pm Center for Internet and Society Talk [31-Jan-08]
Memorial Auditorium
"Final Free Culture Talk"
Lawrence Lessig
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:00pm SRI AI Seminar Series [31-Jan-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not
Questions about Program Behavior"
Andy Ko
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [31-Jan-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
http://www.parc.com/forum/
Abstract below
4:10pm UC Berkeley Philosophy Department Colloquium [31-Jan-08]
Howison Philosophy Library, (305 Moses Hall) (Berkeley)
"Risk and Rationality"
Lara Buchak
Princeton University
http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [31-Jan-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Does consciousness occur in laterally-connected
input/integration layers in the brain's neuronal networks?"
Stuart Hameroff
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [31-Jan-08]
Packard 101
"On 3-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets:
The idea of indirect decoding and the capacity of a class of
broadcast channels"
Chandra Nair
Chinese University of Hong Kong
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
Abstract below
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [31-Jan-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"Synapses and CNS disorders"
Morgan Sheng
MIT
http://web.mit.edu/picower/faculty/sheng.html
http://www-med.stanford.edu/sbrc/calendar/
FRIDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 2008
11:00am SRI AI Seminar Series [1-Feb-08]
EJ228, SRI International
"Pattern and Trend Discovery in Large Document Collections
using Topic Models"
Ramesh Nallapati
Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
Abstract below
12 noon Ethics@Noon [1-Feb-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
"What You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About the Ethics of Stem
Cell Research"
Insoo Hyun
Case Western Reserve Dept of Bioethics
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12 noon Speech Lunch [1-Feb-08]
Phonetics Lab
"The Prosody of Student Confidence for Automatic Tutoring"
Bevan Jones
SJSU
sumner .. stanford.edu
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [1-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
(see abstract for PARC Forum on 31 January 2008)
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [1-Feb-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Repositories and Workflows"
Clifford Lynch
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
3:15pm Philosophy Department Colloquium [1-Feb-08]
Bldg. 90:92Q
"Aristotle and the Sophists"
Stephen Menn
McGill University
http://www-philosophy.stanford.edu/ce.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [1-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Michal Ben-Shachar
Psychology, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
3:30pm Linguistics Department Colloquium [1-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"A Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and
Syllable Structure"
Louis Goldstein
USC
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
Abstract below
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [1-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"The WAVE Project at UCSD"
Alin Deutsch
UCSD
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
MONDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 2008
11:00am Media X Seminar: Workgroup Protocols and Algorithms [4-Feb-08]
Wallenberg Hall Learning theater (Bldg. 160)
"Postcards from the Future"
Davis Masten
http://mediax.stanford.edu/people/visiting-scholars.html#MASTEN
http://mediax.stanford.edu/events_calendar/calendar.html
3:15pm Stanford Phonology Workshop [4-Feb-08]
Linguistics Chair's office, Margaret Jacks Hall
Title to be announced
Seung Kyung Kim
(DRY RUN FOR BLS)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/pinterest/
4:00pm UC Berkeley Linguistics Colloquium [4-Feb-08]
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
"The Social Life of Evidentiality in Nanti Society (Arawak,
Peruvian Amazonia)"
Lev Michael
UT Austin
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
Abstract below
TUESDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 2008
4:15pm Mathematical Logic Seminar [5-Feb-08]
Bldg. 60:119
"Algorithms and Proofs in Geometry"
Michael Beeson
San Jose State
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
Abstract below
4:15pm ENGR110/210: Perspectives in Assistive Technology [5-Feb-08]
Meyer Library 124
"Creative Problem Solving"
Teri A. Adams
Stanford Disability Resource Center
"Introduction to the Needfinding Process"
Jean Hsu & Emilie Fetscher
Stanford University - Product Design
http://www.stanford.edu/class/engr110/
WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY 2008
3:30pm SRI CCB Seminar Series [6-Feb-08]
AE201, SRI International
"Little b: A Symbolic Language For Building Modular Models of Biology"
Aneil Mallavarapu
Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
Abstract below
4:00pm UC Berkeley School of Information Lecture [6-Feb-08]
110 South Hall (Berkeley)
"Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters"
Henry Jenkins
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events/dls20080206
Abstract below
4:15pm EE380: Computer Systems Lab Colloquium [6-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"Program representation using a domain workbench"
Charles Simonyi
Intentional Software Corporation
http://ee380.stanford.edu/contents.html
4:30pm MS&E 472: Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar [6-Feb-08]
Skilling Auditorium
Christine Benninger
President, Humane Society Silicon Valley Mixer
http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande472/
6:00pm MIT Club Talk [6-Feb-08]
Berkeley City Club (Berkeley)
"On Organic Interfaces"
Victor Zue
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
http://www.csail.mit.edu/
http://www.mitcnc.org/Events_Single.asp?eventID=3D1375
($20 for MITCNC members, $30 for non-members)
THURSDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon CSLI CogLunch [7-Feb-08]
Cordura Hall 100
"Metaphysics, Time, and Rationality"
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Stanford University
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
Abstract below
4:00pm PARC Forum [7-Feb-08]
George Pake Auditorium at PARC
"Loans that change lives"
Premal Shah
Kiva.org
http://www.parc.com/forum/
4:15pm SSP10: Symbolic Systems Forum [7-Feb-08]
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
"Meta-Metaphysics Or: On What There Isn't"
Alexis Burgess
Philosophy Department,
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
Abstract below
4:15pm Information Systems Seminar [7-Feb-08]
Packard 101
To be announced
Balaji Prabhakar
Stanford University
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
4:15pm Neurobiology of Disease Seminar Series [7-Feb-08]
Munzer Auditorium, Beckman B060
"The Cruelest Cut of All: Caspase Cleavage of Htt and the
Pathogenesis of HD"
Michael Hayden
http://nis-seminars.stanford.edu/
5:30pm Stanford Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop [7-Feb-08]
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
"Real-Time Evidence for Semantic Coercion"
Brian McElree
NYU
(cosponsored with SPLaT!; refreshments at 5:15pm)
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
Abstract below
FRIDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 2008
12 noon Ethics@Noon [8-Feb-08]
Bldg. 100:101K
Stephen Schneider
Woods Institute / Biological Sciences
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/EIS/lectures_ethics.html
12:30pm CS547: Human-Computer Interaction Seminar [8-Feb-08]
Gates B01
"User Interaction With a Personalized Mobile Recommender of
Leisure Activities"
Kurt Partridge and Ellen Isaacs
PARC
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
Abstract below
2:00pm GRAI Seminar [8-Feb-08]
Gates 120
"Mobile Visual I/O"
Kari Pulli
Nokia Research
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
Abstract below
3:00pm Berkeley Information Access Seminar [8-Feb-08]
107 South Hall (Berkeley)
Title to be announced
Eric Kansa
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i296a-1/s08/schedule.html
3:15pm Friday Cognitive Seminar [8-Feb-08]
Jordan Hall 420:050
Title to be announced
Greg Corrado
Neuroscience, Stanford
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/events_cognitive.html
4:15pm CS545: Stanford-HP InfoSeminar [8-Feb-08]
Gates B03
"Keyword Search on Graph-Structured Data"
S. Sudarshan
IIT
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
Abstract below
____________
Stanford Blood Center: Shortage of O+, O-, A+, A-, and AB-. For an
appointment: http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831.
It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"New Trends in the Foundations of Mathematics"
Grigori Mints
Stanford
A new emphasis on finitist methods and results in mathematics
indicates a turn toward foundations happening under the slogans of
HARD ANALYSIS and PROOF MINING. While previously non-constructive or
infinitistic methods were thought (by an influential minority) to be
philosophically defective, the revival of interest is caused by
mathematical needs. Some of the central results needed development of
new tools that turned out to be instances of well-known constructions
of proof theory. The finitist trend is called "hard analysis" by T.
Tao and contrasted with the ordinary or "soft" mathematical analysis.
The latter works without any restrictions on the abstract notions and
infinitistic methods. Proof mining initiated by G. Kreisel and
developed by U. Kohlenbach applies proof theoretic tools to get
essential strengthening of results proved in the mainstream
mathematics. We present some examples.
____________
CENTER FOR INTERNET AND SOCIETY TALK
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 1:00pm
Memorial Auditorium
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/
"Final Free Culture Talk"
Lawrence Lessig
Creative Commons founder and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig is
giving his final presentation on Free Culture, Copyright and the
future of ideas.
After 10 years of enlightening and inspiring audiences around the
world with multi-media presentations that inspired the Free Culture
movement, Professor Lessig is moving on from the copyright debate and
setting his sights on corruption in Washington.
Lessig is giving a final talk at Stanford University on the subject,
and it is being recorded for the upcoming feature film "Basement
Tapes", an open source documentary (see
<http://www.opensourcecinema.org/>). Guests will also be treated to a
sneak preview of some upcoming scenes from Basement Tapes, and
re-mixed work from the Open Source Cinema website.
Please come and give Professor Lessig our appreciation and for a last
chance to witness this enlightening and provocative presentation.
Event is free to the public. Everyone is welcome.
You can RSVP at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=8274187546
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not
Questions about Program Behavior"
Andy Ko
Carnegie Mellon University
Most software undergoes a brief period of rapid development, followed
by a much longer period of maintenance and adaptation. As a result,
software developers spend most of their time exploring a systems
underlying source code to determine the parts of the system that are
relevant to their tasks. Because these parts are often distributed
throughout a systems modules, and because they can interact in complex
and unpredictable ways, this process of understanding a program's
execution can be extremely difficult. The primary cause of this
difficulty is that developers must answer their questions about a
systems behavior by guessing. For example, a developer wondering, "Why
didn't this button do anything after I pressed it?" must form an answer
such as "Maybe because its event handler wasn't called" and then use
breakpoint debuggers, print statements, and other low-level tools to
verify the explanation. Not only is this process poorly supported by
current tools, but worse yet, there are many potential explanations
for a system's behavior, so developers rarely formulate a valid
explanation on the first attempt. To address this problem, I present a
new kind of program understanding tool called a Whyline, which allows
a developer to select "why did" and "why didn't" questions directly
about the symptoms of a systems behavior. In response, the Whyline
determines which parts of the system and its execution are related to
the symptom in question, while also identifying false assumptions the
developer might have about what occurred during the execution of the
program. By using this approach, developers need not guess about
potential causes of program behavior: they simply point to some
perceptible feature of the faulty behavior and the system identifies
the relevant code. Early prototypes of the Whyline for a simplified
educational programming language reduced debugging time by a factor of
8. I have since generalized the Whyline to support Java programs with
textual and graphical output, inventing several new incremental
algorithms to identify program-specific output, derive output-relevant
questions, and answer questions about a variety of output. A
preliminary study of the Java Whyline found that even people with no
program experience using the Whyline could isolate a bug 3 times
faster than experts with conventional debugging tools.
____________
PARC FORUM
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:00pm - 5:00pm
George Pake Auditorium, PARC
http://www.parc.com/forum/
"Many Eyes: Democratizing Visualization"
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
IBM Many Eyes
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/About_Many_Eyes.html
Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite
in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based
visualizations--ranging from political art projects to news
stories--have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay
users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways
to create them. In order to "democratize" visualization, we have built
Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create
interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to
foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve
not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to
spur discussion and collaboration. We will provide an overview of Many
Eyes, patterns of usage on the site, and what those patterns suggest
about the future of visualization.
About the Speaker: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg are research
scientists in IBM's Visual Communication Lab. Viégas is known for her
pioneering work on depicting chat histories and email. Wattenberg's
visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered
internet classics. Both Viégas and Wattenberg are also known for their
visualization-based artwork, which has been exhibited in venues such
as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of
Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The two
became a team in 2003 when they decided to visualize Wikipedia,
leading to the "history flow" project that revealed the self-healing
nature of the online encyclopedia. They are currently exploring the
power of web-based visualization and the social forms of data analysis
it enables.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Does consciousness occur in laterally-connected
input/integration layers in the brain's neuronal networks?"
Stuart Hameroff
Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona
The brain appears to operate like a computer, with discrete
information states (bits) conveyed by firings (axonal action
potentials, or spikes) of individual neurons. Neuronal dendrites
receive and integrate spike-mediated synaptic inputs, and when
threshold is met, axonal spikes are fired as outputs. With variable
strength synapses, axonal-dendritic spike-mediated synaptic
computation can account for many nonconscious (auto-pilot) cognitive
functions and control of behavior. What about consciousness? The best
measure of consciousness is gamma synchrony EEG which correlates not
with axonal spikes/firings, but with sideways networks of synchronized
dendrites of neighboring neurons connected by gap junctions (dendritic
webs). In computer terms, dendritic webs are laterally-connected
input/integration layers embedded in feed-forward and feed-back
networks. Gap junction openings and closings evolve dendritic web
topologies able to move throughout the brains axonal-dendritic
networks. Within cytoplasmic interiors of dendritic web dendrites, it
is also proposed that quantum computations in microtubules underlie
consciousness (Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR model). The point here is that
synchronized dendritic webs can house the brains conscious pilot able
to move about, tune in and take over from habitual, nonconscious
auto-pilot modes. The proposal is testable and consistent with all
known neurocognitive science.
____________
INFORMATION SYSTEMS SEMINAR
on Thursday, 31 January 2008, 4:15pm-5:15pm
Packard 101
http://isl.stanford.edu/colloquium.html
"On 3-receiver broadcast channel with degraded message sets:
The idea of indirect decoding and the capacity of a class of
broadcast channels"
Chandra Nair
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Are capacity regions of 3 or more receivers a straightforward
extension of the two receivers in general, or do we require new
techniques?
In this talk I shall show, using an important special case of degraded
message sets, that such straightforward extensions are not optimal. We
introduce a new technique, called indirect decoding, that can be
combined with existing techniques to improve the achievable region. We
prove the optimality of this technique in a few non-trivial special
cases (i.e. determine the capacity regions).
This is joint work with Prof. Abbas El Gamal and the relevant paper
can be downloaded from:
http://chandra.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/pub/publications.html
or reference: http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3327
About the Speaker: Chandra Nair obtained his bachelors from Indian
Institute of Technology(Madras) in 1999 and his masters and PhD from
Stanford University in 2002 and 2005 respectively. He was a
post-doctoral researcher with the Theory Group at Microsoft research
till June 2007. He joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Fall
2007.
His current research interests concerns optimization problems in large
systems and multi-user information theory. In particular, he is
interested in the new and growing area where ideas and techniques from
statistical physics, computer science and probability theory are used
to develop theory and algorithms for optimization problems in large
systems; and also in applying these results to engineering problems
for attaining better performance than the traditional approaches. He
is also interested in multi-user information theory; in particular in
understanding and characterizing capacity regions for multi-user
channels.
____________
SRI AI SEMINAR SERIES
on Friday, 1 February 2008, 11:00am
EJ228, SRI International
http://www.ai.sri.com/seminars/
"Pattern and Trend Discovery in Large Document Collections
using Topic Models"
Ramesh Nallapati
Carnegie Mellon University
I will present my post doctoral work at CMU on applying topic models
for pattern and trend discovery in large document corpora. I will go
over four different models I developed in this framework:
(i) Multiscale Topic-tomography Model: This is a new topic model that
models evolution of topic content with time. Our novel idea of
combining topic models with Multi-scale Haar Wavelet analysis allows
the user to zoom into and zoom out of topic-evolution-display at
various resolutions of time scale. In addition, it overcomes the
problem of non-conjugacy between the prior and conditional
distributions in Dynamic Topic models, by successfully using a
combination of beta-binomial distributions to model topic evolution.
(ii) Link-PLSA-LDA: This model combines PLSA and LDA models to
simultaneously model text and hyperlinks. A new feature of this model
in relation with other existing models such as PHITS and Mixed
Membership model is that it allows topical information to propagate
from one document to another via the hyperlinks. Our experiments on
blog data indicate that the new model performs better than the
aforementioned models on the task of link prediction.
(iii) Detecting Within-Topic Word Correlation: In this work, we
propose an algorithm that discovers both short-range and long-range
dependencies between words within the topics discovered by LDA. The
algorithm takes the topical assignments of LDA as input data and uses
a Markov Random Field structure learning algorithm to discover topical
dependencies between words. The output of the model on AP corpus
reveals some interesting patterns.
(iv) Distributed LDA: In this work, I built a distributed
implementation of the variational inference for the LDA model. The
implementation distributes the workload of E-step for subsets of
documents among the worker nodes which in turn send the sufficient
statistics to the master node for the execution of the M-step. Our
experiments indicate that the implementation achieves more than a
10-fold speed-up compared to a serial implementation, allowing us to
scale this model to large scale document collections.
If time permits, I will also talk about my latest work in progress,
that applies new developments in simultaneous sparse approximations to
automatically discover representative documents in large document
collections.
____________
LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
on Friday, 1 February 2008, 3:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/colloq/
"A Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and
Syllable Structure"
Louis Goldstein
USC
A fundamental problem in understanding speech production is how the
temporal coherence of the speech units associated with a given lexical
unit is maintained despite changes due to speaking rate, prosodic
embedding, and transient perturbations. To address this, a dynamical
model of temporal planning of speech has been developed (Nam &
Saltzman, 2003; Goldstein et al, 2006; Nam, in press). In this model,
each speech unit (constriction gesture) is associated with a planning
oscillator, or clock, and the oscillators within the ensemble
associated with a particular lexical item are coupled to one another
in a pattern represented as a coupling graph.
I will introduce this model and show how it is possible to account for
syllable structure in terms of intrinsic modes of coupling that
require no learning. Onset consonant gestures are hypothesized to be
coupled in-phase to the tautosyllabic vowel gesture (regardless of how
many consonants there are in an onset), while coda consonant gestures
are coupled in an anti-phase pattern. This hypothesis can account for
the universality of CV syllables, the relatively free combinatoriality
that onsets and rimes typically exhibit in languages, and the
seemingly paradoxical finding that single consonants are acquired by
children earlier in onset than coda, but consonant clusters are
acquired earlier in coda than in onset. In addition, the topology of
the coupling graph can account simultaneously for regularities in
relative timing and the patterns of stochastic variability that they
exhibit.
References
Goldstein, L., Byrd, D., and Saltzman, E. (2006) The role of vocal
tract gestural action units in understanding the evolution of
phonology. In M. Arbib (Ed.) From Action to Language: The Mirror
Neuron System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 215-249.
Nam, H. (in press). A competitive, coupled oscillator model of moraic
structure: Split-gesture dynamics focusing on positional asymmetry. In
Cole, J. and Hualde, J. (eds). Papers in Laboratory phonology
9. Berlin: Mouton deGruyter.
Nam, H. and Saltzman, E. 2003. A Competitive, Coupled Oscillator Model
of Syllable Structure. Proceeding 15th ICPhS 2003, Barcelona,
2253-2256.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 1 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"The WAVE Project at UCSD"
Alin Deutsch
UCSD
Modern Web applications are often powered by an underlying database
and generate their pages dynamically as a function of internal state,
database contents, as well as the user's actions (e.g. clicking on a
button/link, selecting an item from a menu, inputing text, etc.). The
resulting user interaction is governed by a workflow of considerable
complexity, with high bug potential, which is usually realized. To
boost both the developers' and users' confidence in the correct
behavior of the Web application, we developed WAVE, an automatic
design-time verifier for interactive, database-driven Web applications
specified using high-level modeling tools such as WebML.
WAVE allows the developer to specify desired properties of the
temporal evolution of the interaction with the user (aka "runs"). For
instance, "regardless of what the user does and regardless of the
database contents, book orders will be placed only if the correct
payment is received". WAVE is a sound and complete verifier for a
large class of properties and applications, i.e. it declares an
application correct if and only if for every database contents, every
corresponding run satisfies the properties. A counterexample database
and run are exhibited otherwise. For other applications, WAVE can be
used as an incomplete verifier, as commonly done in software
verification. Our experiments on four representative data-driven
applications and a battery of common properties yielded surprisingly
good verification times, on the order of seconds. This suggests that
interactive applications controlled by database queries may be
unusually well suited to automatic verification. They also show that
the coupling of model checking with database optimization techniques
used in the implementation of WAVE is extremely effective. These
findings are significant both to the database area and to automatic
verification in general.
This is joint work with Victor Vianu, Liying Sui and Dayou Zhou, all
from UCSD.
The talk assumes no prior model checking background.
About the Speaker: Alin Deutsch is an assistant professor of Computer
Science and engineering at UC San Diego. He joined UCSD in 2002 upon
completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of
Pennsylvania. He also holds a Diploma of Electrical Engineer from the
Polytechnic University Bucharest (Romania) and an M.Sc. degree from
the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany). Alin received an NSF
CAREER award in 2004, a Sloan fellowship in 2006, and a SIGMOD Best
Paper Award Honorable Mention in 2006.
Alin is interested in developing technologies for large-scale data
publishing and integration on the Web. His research ranges from design
and optimization of XML query languages to building analysis and
assisted-design tools to help data owners grasp the ramifications of
publishing their data on the Web.
____________
UC BERKELEY LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM
on Monday, 4 February 2008, 4:00pm
182 Dwinelle Hall (Berkeley)
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/events/
"The Social Life of Evidentiality in Nanti Society
(Arawak, Peruvian Amazonia)"
Lev Michael
UT Austin
Evidentiality is unusual among grammatical categories in the
importance that linguists have given to its social and interactional
functions. These functions have played an important role in
definitions of evidentiality as a grammatical category, and in
discussions of its broader communicative consequences (Chafe and
Nichols 1986, Aikhenvald 2004). At the same time, more
socially-oriented scholars have made it clear that evidentials are a
significant linguistic resource for speakers in manipulating the
social valence of representations of events (Hill and Irvine,
1993). Despite the fact that evidentiality sits squarely at the nexus
of linguistic form and social action, ethnographically-grounded and
linguistically-informed studies of evidentials as a facet of
communicative interaction remain rare (Sidnell 2005).
This talk presents results from my research on the use of evidentials
among speakers of Nanti, an Arawak language of Peruvian Amazonia, for
whom evidentiality is an important concern in everyday communicative
interactions. My principal goal is to delineate both the social
instrumentality of evidentials and the ways in which broader social
context affects how individuals deploy evidentials. I also provide an
account for the diverse interactional functions of evidentials in
Nanti society, based on their deictic properties and their
participation in chains of inference that result in "pragmatic
metaphors" (Silverstein 1976) which link evidentials to issues of
moral responsibility and affective and social distance.
Using ethnographically contextualized transcripts of everyday Nanti
interactions, I show that the interactional function typically
attributed to evidentials, that is, the mitigation of the speaker's
responsibility for the facticity of utterances (see e.g. Palmer 2001),
is only one of several interactional ends to which Nantis put
evidentials. In the realm of responsibility, Nantis also employ
evidentials to mitigate their responsibility for events, rather than
simply utterances. This interactional function depends on inferences
regarding involvement in events, based on the sensory modes of access
to events denoted by evidentials. I also show that Nanti speakers can
employ evidentials in talking about their own actions to emphasize,
rather than diminish, their individual responsibility for evaluative
and moral stances that they articulate.
Focusing on particular key individuals, I also examine how Nantis
deployment of evidentials is shaped by their own position in local
social hierarchies relative to those of their fellow interactants, and
how Nantis can deploy evidentials to display affective closeness of
distance from others. In particular, I show how socially powerful
Nanti individuals may omit evidentials in a way that enables them to
appropriate others' knowledge and experiences for their own
interactional purposes. I also show how Nantis may employ evidentials
to indicate affective alienation from absent third parties, as well as
to indicate respect for co-present individuals.
Works Cited
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. Cambridge University
Press.
Chafe, Wallace and Johanna Nichols (Eds.). 1986. Evidentiality: The
linguistics coding of epistemology. Ablex Publishing.
Hill, Jane and Judith Irving (Eds.). Responsibility and Evidence in
Oral Discourse. Cambridge University Press.
Palmer, F.R. 2001. Mood and Modality. Cambridge University Press.
Sidnell, Jack. 2005. Talk and Practical Epistemology. John Benjamins.
Silverstein, Michael. Shifters, linguistic categories, cultural
description. In Keith Basso and Henry Selby (Eds.), Meaning in
Anthropology. University of New Mexico Press. pp. 11-56.
____________
MATHEMATICAL LOGIC SEMINAR
on Tuesday, 5 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 60:119
http://www-logic.stanford.edu/
"Algorithms and Proofs in Geometry"
Michael Beeson
San Jose State
The 48 two-dimensional constructions of Euclid are among the world's
first algorithms. We pursue the analogy: Euclid's constructions are to
elementary geometry as computable functions are to number theory and
elementary analysis. We consider extracting algorithms from proofs,
proving the correctness of algorithms, as well as questions of
decidability, undecidability, and efficiency. Euclid's constructions
do not always depend continuously upon the input parameters; we
discuss how that phenomenon is related to proofs.
____________
SRI CCB SEMINAR SERIES
on Wednesday, 6 February 2008, 3:30pm
AE201, SRI International
"Little b: A Symbolic Language For Building Modular Models of Biology"
Aneil Mallavarapu
Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
The little b project is an effort to provide an open source language
which allows scientists to build mathematical models of complex
systems. Our goal is to stimulate widespread sharing and reuse of
biological models.
Today modellers retread a path walked by software and electronics
engineers: the problem of how to specify complex systems concisely,
comprehensibly and reusably. Engineers develop large complex systems
by marshalling time-tested tools and approaches which subdue
complexity through modular interfaces and hierarchical design. For
biological models, a new set of problems exists: how to tame
combinatorial complexity arising from molecular interactions, how to
deal with uncertainty and changing knowledge, and how to permit
multiple analyses of the same formal representation of biological
knowledge.
Little b is a language designed to enable terse, readable and modular
descriptions of cellular and molecular systems. The language extends
Common Lisp with a reasoner, symbolic mathematics and pattern-matching
algorithms. Lisp's powerful metaprogramming capabilities enable a
"literate modelling" style in which the model serves as a formal
specification of biological knowledge. I'll discuss the little b
approach, and supporting tools, with examples which demonstrate how
the language handles multicellular and molecular complexity.
About the Speaker: Dr. Mallavarapu directs the little b project, an
open source effort aimed at developing tools for modular, shareable
mathematical models of biology. Prior to joining Harvard, he worked at
Millennium Pharmaceuticals, where he developed several software and
wetware technologies used in the company's genomics-based drug
discovery platform. He initiated a pathway-centric approach to
genomic information management. Dr. Mallavarapu's training is in cell
biology and biochemistry. He developed a number of optical
technologies for marking, perturbing and visualizing protein dynamics
in living cells during PhD work with Tim Mitchison at UCSF, and
earlier predoctoral work with Dan Jay at Harvard. He is currently
Senior Research Scientist at the Department of Systems Biology at
Harvard Medical School.
____________
BERKELEY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
on Wednesday, 6 February 2008, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
101 South Hall (Berkeley)
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/about/events
"Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters"
Henry Jenkins
According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And
American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced
media content and about a third have circulated media that they have
produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics
reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the
everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of
disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture
are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out
of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on
insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur
Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of
media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory
culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges
confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating
their own media as well as the challenges confronting those youth who
are excluded from participation in these on-line worlds as a
consequence of lack of access to technologies, skills, competencies,
and cultural experiences taken for granted by their
contemporaries. These issues can not be understood through a simple
opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather
require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young
people have online and the range of different interactions between
adults and teens in these new participatory culture. In the course of
the presentation, I will be sharing a range of curricular materials
and activities being developed by MIT's Project nml to support the
teaching of these new social skills and cultural competencies.
About the Speaker: Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT
Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of
Humanities. He is also the author and/or editor of twelve books on
various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers:
Exploring Participatory Culture, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional
Impact of Popular Culture, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and
Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of
Popular Culture, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer
Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his
blog, henryjenkins.org. He is one of the principal investigators for
The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders
working to promote the educational use of computer and video games and
of the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort with the
MIT Media Lab to use new media to enhance how people live in local
communities. He is one of the principle investigators for GAMBIT, a
lab focused on promoting experimentation through game design, and of
Project nml, a MacArthur Foundation funded project that develops
curricular materials focused on promoting the social skills and
cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the new
media era. Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the
University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University
of Wisconsin-Madison.
____________
CSLI COGLUNCH
on Thursday, 7 February 2008, 12 noon - 1:00pm
Cordura Hall 100
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/events/Coglunch/
"Metaphysics, Time, and Rationality"
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Stanford University
One of the oldest problems in Metaphysics is Diodorus' Master
Argument. Diodorus derived a contradiction from the conjoint assertion
of three propositions: 1) Every past truth is necessary; 2) The
impossible does not follow from the possible; 3) Something is possible
which neither is nor will be true. Diodorus purported to derive the
negation of 3), as if he wanted "to infect the future with the
necessity which belongs to the past."
Following the lead of Jules Vuillemin, Necessity or Contingency. The
Master Argument, CSLI Publications, Stanford University, 1996, who
construed certain of the modalities as essentially tensed, and drawing
on Henri Bergson's metaphysics of temporality, I have been able to
defend free will against the Master argument in a novel way (see J.-P.
Dupuy, "Philosophical Foundations of a New Concept of Equilibrium in
the Social Sciences: Projected Equilibrium", Philosophical Studies,
100, 2000, p. 323-345.)
The talk will not delve into the technical details of the
demonstration but will rather explore the relevance and the
implications of the proposed solution for the theory of rationality.
We will show in particular how it solves elegantly some of the most
nagging paradoxes of Rational Choice Theory (Newcomb, Backward
Induction) and helps tackle such pressing issues as the efficiency and
ethics of nuclear deterrence or the foundations of the Precautionary
Principle.
About the Speaker: Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor of philosophy, Ecole
Polytechnique, Paris, and founding director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de
Recherche en Epistemologie Applique), the philosophical research group
of the Ecole Polytechnique, and Full Professor (1/3rd time),
Departments of French and, by courtesy, Political Science, Stanford
University. He is also a Stanford C.S.L.I. Researcher, and is
affiliated with the Stanford Science, Technology, and Society Program,
the Symbolic Systems Forum, the Anthropology Department, and the
Religious Studies Department. He is a member of the French Academy of
Technology.
____________
SSP10: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
on Thursday, 7 February 2008, 4:15pm
Bldg. 380:380C (Math Corner)
http://symsys.stanford.edu/ssp_events
"Meta-Metaphysics Or: On What There Isn't"
Alexis Burgess
Philosophy Department, Stanford
Metaphysics is supposed to be the most general study of "what there
is". Thus debates in metaphysics often take the following form.
Professor X asserts that something exists (or some things exist).
Professor Y denies that that thing exists (or those things exist).
Argument ensues. Sometimes a consensus emerges among the philosophical
community about which side is right; more often, though, as one would
expect in philosophy, agreement proves elusive. Yet there is a
striking degree of agreement among contemporary analytic philosophers
about what such pairs of professors are saying; and in particular,
about what we mean by the word 'existence'. According to the orthodoxy
derived from the work of W. V. Quine, existence is just what's
expressed by the so-called existential quantifier of first-order
logic. It is a primitive, unanalyzable notion. Unfortunately, the
orthodoxy offers no compelling solution to a problem that has
frustrated philosophers since antiquity, and which, ironically, Quine
himself brought to the fore in his seminal essay 'On What There
Is'. The problem is that it is hard to see how Professor Y could ever
be right. For how can we deny the existence of something without
referring to that thing, thereby presupposing its existence in our
very denial? In this presentation, I'll outline some famous attempts
to answer this meta-metaphysical challenge to the coherence of
metaphysical debate, present the arguments against them, and then
begin to develop a novel way out of the problem: what might be called
Defeatism about intuitively true, negative existential statements.
____________
STANFORD SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP
on Friday, 8 February 2008, 5:30pm
Margaret Jacks Hall 460:126
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/semgroup/
"Real-Time Evidence for Semantic Coercion"
Brian McElree
NYU
(cosponsored with SPLaT!; refreshments at 5:15pm)
To what degree are the meanings of natural language expressions
compositional? Strongly compositional approaches to meaning maintain
that each operation of semantic composition corresponds to an
operation of syntactic composition, so that the interpretation of an
expression can be fully determined by the meanings of its constituents
and by the syntactic way the constituents are combined. Expressions
containing syntax-semantic mismatches challenge strong
compositionality, as they may require semantic operations that do not
correspond to syntactic operations.
The pairing of an aspectual verb, such as begin or finish, with a
non-event-denoting object (e.g., ...began the book or ...finished the
beer) has been argued to contain one type of syntax-semantic
mismatch. The interpretation such verb phrases has been hypothesized
to involve a process of complement coercion, a non-syntactic process
that converts the entity-denoting object into an event description
that satisfies the selectional demands of the verb. I will present
studies using a variety of real-time processing measures (self-paced
reading and eye-tracking measures, magnetoencephalographic [MEG]
patterns, and speed/accuracy trade-off measures) that (1) show that
expressions hypothesized to involve complement coercion are indeed
more taxing to process than expressions with transparent
syntax-semantic mappings (including expressions involving metonymies,
such as ...read Dickens) and (2) suggest that the observed processing
costs reflect the operations involved in building an event description
to resolve the semantic type mismatch between the verb and
object. Time permitting, I will discuss differences between complement
coercion and other types of syntax-semantic mismatches, which do not
engender the same type of processing cost.
____________
CS547: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION SEMINAR
on Friday, 8 February 2008, 12:30-2:00pm
Gates B01
http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/
"User Interaction With a Personalized Mobile Recommender of
Leisure Activities"
Kurt Partridge and Ellen Isaacs
PARC
How do you decide where to go for fun? In this talk, we will discuss
a mobile system that helps people discover places to go during their
leisure time by recommending nearby venues such as restaurants, shops,
museums, events, and parks. This system, codenamed Magitti,
personalizes its recommendations by combining explicit general
preferences, collaborative filtering, and predictions of your current
activity and interests from past behavior. We will give an overview
of the initial fieldwork, system design, and user evaluation, and
present a demonstration of the system.
About the Speakers: Kurt Partridge is a researcher in the Ubiquitous
Computing Area in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). His research
spans a variety of areas, including context awareness, activity
modeling, location modeling, mobile device interaction, and wearable
computing. He is particularly interested in systems and devices that
blend naturally with people's everyday activities. Kurt received a
Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2005.
Ellen Isaacs is an interaction designer and researcher in the
Socio-Technical and Interaction Research group at Palo Alto Research
Center. During her career, Ellen has moved between design, evaluation,
research, and management at a variety of Silicon Valley companies,
including Sun Microsystems, Electric Communities, Excite, AT&T Labs,
and most recently, Izix Consulting, her own interaction design
consulting firm. Her research interests have focused primarily on
systems that support collaboration and communication through a variety
of media. She is the co-author with Alan Walendowski of "Designing
From Both Sides of the Screen," a book about the process of
interaction design and the collaboration between interaction designers
and software engineers. Ellen is also an accomplished photographer who
sells her images professionally. She received her PhD in
psycholinguistics from Stanford University.
____________
GRAI SEMINAR
on Friday, 8 February 2008, 2:00pm
Gates 120
http://cs.stanford.edu/people/theobalt/GRAI.html
"Mobile Visual I/O"
Kari Pulli
Nokia Research
Mobile devices are the new frontier in computation, internet
connectivity, imaging, and computer graphics. For many people it
provides their first computer of any kind. For example in China there
are about 100 million PCs but over 400 million mobile phones. And the
sales of camera phones far surpass the number of digital or any other
types of consumer cameras. The visual capabilities of these devices
have progressed at amazing pace, and today the high-end smart phones
have large color screens, fast CPUs, even dedicated graphics HW
acceleration. We will cover the short history of mobile 3D graphics,
and introduce recent mobile graphics standards such as OpenGL ES, M3G,
and OpenVG; these provide visual output. In recent years photography
and graphics have begun to move closer to each other, we will also
discuss computational and contextual photography and augmented reality
as fertile research topics and present some results; these provide
visual input.
About the Speaker: Kari Pulli is a Research Fellow at Nokia Research
Center in Palo Alto, where he heads a team working on how to make good
use of cameras on mobile phones. He has been an active contributor to
several mobile graphics standards.
Kari has a PhD in computer science from University of Washington and
Lic. Tech., M.Sc., and MBA from University of Oulu, where he also
taught computer graphics as an adjunct faculty.
Before Nokia Kari has worked on graphics at Stanford University,
Alias|Wavefront, SGI, and Microsoft; during 2004-06 Kari was also a
Visiting Scientist at MIT.
____________
CS545: STANFORD-HP INFOSEMINAR
on Friday, 8 February 2008, 4:15pm - 5:30pm
Gates B03
http://infolab.stanford.edu/infoseminar/
"Keyword Search on Graph-Structured Data"
S. Sudarshan
IIT
A variety of types of data, such as relational, XML and HTML data can
be naturally represented using a graph model of data, with entities as
nodes and relationships as edges. Graph representations are also a
natural choice for representing information extracted from
unstructured data, and for representing information integrated from
heterogeneous sources of data.
Keyword search is a natural way to retrieve information from graph
representations of data, especially in the common situation where the
graphs do not have a well-defined schema. Unlike text or Web search,
there is no natural notion of a document, and information about a
single conceptual entity may be split across multiple nodes. Answers
to queries are therefore usually modeled as trees that connect nodes
matching the keywords, with each answer tree having an associated
score. The goal of keyword search then is to find answers with the
highest scores. A number of systems, including the BANKS system
developed at IIT Bombay, are based on such a model for answering
keyword queries.
In this talk we first outline background material on keyword querying
on graph data, including models for ranking of answer trees. We then
focus on search algorithms for finding top-ranked answers. We outline
key issues in finding top-ranked answers, and present algorithms that
address the problem in the context of in-memory graphs. We then
consider the problem of search on external memory graphs, and briefly
outline our on-going work on external memory graph search based on a
multi-granular graph representation.
About the Speaker: S. Sudarshan received the Ph.D. from the Univ. of
Wisconsin, Madison in 1992. He was a Member of the Technical Staff in
the database research group at AT&T Bell Laboratories, from 1992 to
1995, and he has been at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT),
Bombay since 1995. He spent a year on sabbatical at Microsoft
Research, USA in 2004-05.
Sudarshan's research interests center on database systems, and his
current research projects include keyword querying on databases,
processing and optimization of complex queries, and database support
for securing and testing applications. Sudarshan is a co-author of
the widely used textbook, Database System Concepts, 5th Ed., by
Silberschatz, Korth and Sudarshan.
____________
END MATERIAL
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